Oct 19, 2006

attack in broad daylight!

I left my office today to go to our nearby factory. As I leave the building, I see right across the street a crowd of people with 4 police cars. A lot of activity. I hesitate, not knowing if their was a car accident there, if someone got hurt, a chefetz chashud (suspicious object that night be a bomb) or any one of many other possibilities.

I look around for a minute and decide to keep going. I walk through the crowd. Everyone is talking to each other. It was a crowd of about 20 people standing on a corner outside of the entrance to 3 different (open air)parking lots mingling with policemen. Then I see sitting on the side a woman who looks distraught. She has somebody holding a newspaper over her head to shield her from the light drizzle that had just begun and she was talkign to a policewoman.

As I passed by I looked and did not see her injured, as I still thought maybe a car had hit someone (and I missed the ambulances), and still had no idea what was going on.

I kept going and got to my location. Someone there who came in after me told me that there had been a robbery. The woman I had seen had been attacked and robbed of the merchandise (diamonds) she had been carrying.

There is all sorts of talk of an inside job. Why did the attacker pick her out of the crowd of people? It happened at a time when a lot of people show up for work and there were other people around. Was she randomly selected or did someone tell someone she was leaving the building with merchandise? Was she part of it? The goods were insured, so was an insurance scam involved? Nobody knew details, but lots of rumors are going around.

As I passed by the location again on my way back to the office, things had quieted down and the area had cleared. There was only one policeman left talking to a parking lot attendant about which was the attacker might have gone.

But as I am walking by, I start thinking. What would I have done had I been there 10 minutes earlier? If I walked out just in time to witness the event, what would I have done. The images roll through my mind like a Bruce Willis action film and I picture myself seeing the event unfold, realize what is happening and be aware enough to jump the guy and pound him until he is bloody and can't walk and hand him off to the police.

Then I think I probably would not have registered in my brain what was goign on until it was too late. Even if I had realized in time, I probably would have frozen. Even if not, I probably would have been too slow and stunned to actually even attempt to stop the guy and probably would have gotten hurt in the process of trying...

Ahhhh... our dreams are so much more pleasant. Do all guys imagine the Bruce Willis action movie reaction?

6 comments:

I think we all dream that (and in my case I am not leaving work but coming home right afer hitting a grand slam in the bottom of the 9th to win the 7th game of the World Series). Usually I have those dreams after eating too much horse radish on Pesach

But I also have a nightmare. I get my chance in the world series and its shabbos so I have to walk 20 miles to the stadium and I can't find cleates that fit cause my feet are too swollen. So I have to bat barefoot...oy the pebbles.

Some of my mother's relatives were in the diamond business in NY many years past. Once, in the 30s, one of these cousins got held up by two guys with guns right as the staff had all stepped out for lunch.

They told him to put his hands up. He threw a telephone out the window of his 23rd-story office instead and yelled for the cops. They shot him in the arm and he played dead. The crooks ran away and got nothing, leaving behind about 20,000 in stones. The cousin got a broken arm.

Funny thing is, 20 years later, this cousin's SON got robbed in the family apartment. That time they lost 30,000. Win some lose some, I guess.

Related Posts

Pages

Follow by Email

.

Disclaimer: Some of the links and banners on Life in Israel are ads, and some are affiliate links. Affiliate links are links that will earn me a commission off any purchases you might make after clicking on the link/banner, though you will not pay more because of that.

About Me

I am a regular Joe with a Yeshiva background. I learned in Telshe Yeshiva, Heichal HaTorah (R' Tzvi Kushelevsky), and a now defunct Halacha Kollel. I have semicha from R' Zalman Nechemia Goldberg and kaballa in Shechita from Dayan Schwartz of Kehillas HaYeraim (Chomas HaKashrus). I have a college degree in Finance from Touro College and am also a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.
My wife and I, with our 8 children, ben porat yosef (knayna hara), live in Eretz Yisrael.